Category: Website Performance
Top 3 Reasons You Need A Managed WordPress Service
Top 3 Reasons You Need A Managed WordPress Service
Regular monitoring
Any number of problems can arise with a WordPress website. It is important to have a human regularly monitoring your WordPress website. With a Managed WordPress Service, you will have any number of technical staff regularly monitoring your website. Every website on the Internet is vulnerable to a long list of issues from hackers to hardware failure. No system is impermeable and even external events can take a website down such as network router failures.
Freedom to Focus
With a Managed WordPress Service, you don’t have to spend your valuable time dealing with any technical issues. This allows you to do what matters, that is build your content and audience. How can you spend your valuable time on SEO or building new content for your website when you have to deal with technical trouble or malware. An analogy I like to use is that you want to focus on driving your car, not working on the engine.
Expert Support
As a blogger or business person, you should not have to be a technical expert at WordPress. With a Managed WordPress Service, you get a team of experienced WordPress experts that support you when trouble arises.
What sort of trouble should you be concerned with? Malware, hackers, software bugs etc. Many people aren’t aware that almost every WordPress website on the Internet is probed for vulnerabilities and password guessing, all the time. The content or popularity of the site doesn’t matter. Hackers just want to get into your system so they can use to it trick Google and other search engines into helping their money websites.
Having a team of WordPress experts on your side saves a lot of time and money for a low-cost investment.
Matraex Inc., offers an affordable Managed WordPress Service with regular monitoring, hacker/malware defense and removal service, schedule reports, and emergency updates/security patches. Contact us for a free quote!
3 Ways to Improve Your Boise Website Design in 2016
3 Ways to Improve Your Boise Website Design in 2016
Here are 3 Ways to Improve Your Boise Website Design in 2016. Google now applies a score to your website by checking to see if it is mobile-friendly. Another important update for 2016 is to build brief, easy to read content. The third website checkup is for fast page loading. All three combined help build an easy to read website, that loads quickly, and scores well with the search engines.
Mobile-friendly
Also known as responsive design, restructures and adjust various content sizing depending on the device the visitor is using. For example, if Joe from Boise, Idaho visits this page on his desktop computer, he will get a full, wide-screen content rich experience. If Kelly from Garden City, Idaho were to visit this same page on your iPhone 6, she would be served the same content but slightly adjusted. Some photos would be scaled down to fit the smaller screen better, the text would be increased for easier readability. Finally, the content would all be stacked up for easy vertical scrolling. No content would be tiny or pushed off the side of the screen. Thus, Kelly would be presented with a mobile-friendly website design.
Easy to Read Content
The search engines also apply a readability analysis of the content on a web page. Statistics show that many visitors on the Internet are not masters of the English language. Therefore, simple, short sentences make it easier for you to communicate your message and obtain better search engine results.
Fast Page Loading
Finally, the third way to improve your Boise Website Design in 2016 is to have your website optimized for speed. No one likes waiting for slow loading web pages and the search engines have come to realize this. So in some cases, the faster your website loads, the better it helps your search engine rankings.
The 3 Ways to Improve Your Boise Website Design in 2016 are mobile-friendly website design, easy to read content, and fast page loading times. If you are interested in a free quote or website design analysis, please contact us at (208) 344-1115.
Custom network tools we use at Matraex
We had a need for some Network Tools and we could not find them, so we created them
As Matraex has been developing websites over the last 15+ years, we have used many tools to do it.
We often find areas which there are no tools, or we could automate time consuming or error prone tasks in order to get them done more quickly and efficiently.
For these areas, we have developed some Network Tools which help us to get what we need done.
DNS and Name Servers
Bulk DNS Lookup
One of areas we identified was when dealing with new customers with a large number of domains. In ideal situations, the domains would all be registered with a single registrar account and all using known name servers. However that has not always been the case. We built the Bulk MX, DNS Domain Lookup tool to help us quickly assess the domain name, where it is located, who hosts the Name Servers, domains and mail services.
Name Server Compare
In other cases we found that we needed help in identifying where multiple name servers is not set to the same value on different servers. For example if a domain uses three different name servers, there are times that those name servers many not be setup the same and may report different values.
For this we built the https://www.matraex.com/nameserver-compare-tool/
This is especially useful when moving a number of domains from one name server to another.
Website Performance
Website Performance Assessment Log
To help us track the performance increase (or decrease) for Websites we built the Website Performance Assessment Log. The tool has very little functionality itself, however it allows you to type in statistics from Pingdom and from Google’s PageSpeed Insights, then once you make changes to your site you can type in the next set of statistics. This is helps to track which changes made a difference and which changes did not.
WordPress Website Check
We needed to quickly be able to assess a new WordPress website. So we built the Website Check tool which grabs some quick speed and page load statistics, does some security checks and checks on what your WordPress site exposes.
Other less popular, but some times helpful tools,
- our CSS helper tool, this tool helps us identify duplicate and overriding style sheet definitions on a single style sheet.
- Our buik – unix time to date converter. You can paste in a block of text (typically I copy this from some syslog file which logged in unix timestamps) and the tool replaces any found timestamps to help us quickly read the results with Date/ Time stamps
Matraex Inc has other tools as well and we try to offer these tools free (within reason) in order to allow others to do the same thing we do.
WordPress Website Check Instant tool 3 feedback areas
WordPress Website Check Instant tool 3 feedback areas
When working with WordPress websites, there are three main areas we assess within the first few seconds, speed, security and exposure. To help us quickly do this, we built a tool, WordPress Website Check Instant tool 3 feedback areas, which pulls this information quickly and puts it into a single interface.
WordPress Website Check – http://matraex.com/website-check.php
While each of the three areas of speed, security and exposure go much deeper than this small scan, we are able to see some very important metrics very quickly.
Three Checks
Speed
We can see the download speed, the size of your home page, the number of external CSS files and the number of external scripts. This helps us to see how well the site has been optimized. Typically wordpress websites are made up of a Theme with enabled capabilities, as well as a number of plugins. Each of the capabilities and plugins will often have their own stylesheets and script files which can add up to a bloated website.
Security
WordPress websites are the subject of frequent hack attempts. Website scanners quickly find WordPress sites that have their admin and login scripts exposed. The scanner identifies the scripts. If the scripts do not block access after a number of failed attempts (with the username ‘admin’ and then with a random username) the script fails.
Exposure
WordPress websites often publish their version number as well as details about which plugins it uses. This information ideally is private and if possible should be kept private. When vulnerabilities in these tools are found, this is an advertisement to exploit your site.
The results can be saved and a link will be sent to your email so you can permanently have access to the results
The tool is our way of checking a site within seconds, and we offer it free. Our hope is that others find this useful ad will come to Matraex, Inc for their Website Development, Design, Hosting and Security needs.
Matraex, Inc
208.344.1115
Website Performance Assessment Tool Store Compare Page Speed Size Grade
Webpage performance is important and there are a plethora of tools out there that allow you to see your website’s performance.
The tools give a large amount of information and website owners can use that information to make assessments and improvements.
As we use these tools to help our clients improve the performance of their websites, we found a couple of needs:
- We needed a tool to quickly compare the results between changes
- We needed somewhere we could go to quickly lookup results next time that we evaluated the performance
So, we built the Website Performance Assessment Tool (matraex.com/website-performance).
This tool allows us to 1) Enter a web page url 2) Link to two third party performance tools(pingdom,PageSpeed) 3) Enter the results and 4) Save
The numeric results are then stored in a table and as we make changes we can see how performance improves.
With a couple of enhancements (the ability to track multiple urls and an improved User Interface) we decided to make this tool public and encourage others to use it.
The primary benefits we see are:
- The ability for non technical users to track their site performance
- Website owners can track and evaluate changes made by their website developer
- Website developers and website owners can use the tool to communicate performance expectations and results
Here is one example of how it can work:
- A website owner opens the website assessment performance tool and enters their website url
- They use the quick links to generate metrics for a Performance Grade, Number of Requests, Load time, Page size and a Desktop and Mobile Grade
- They enter the metrics into the tool and click Save
- They notice that the total Load time is more than 4 seconds so they ask their website developer to improve the results.
- Specifically they describe they want:
- the Load Time to decrease to less than 2 seconds and
- the Desktop and Mobile Grade should improve to better than 85% each
- The developer makes changes and tells the owner the changes are complete.
- The owner opens the Performance Tool and re enters the metrics and evaluates whether it is true.
- One month later the owner comes back to the tool and checks again and can see the history and whether performance has degraded.